To parents who do not know what to prepare their children for

If you are reading this, you already know the worry.

You have children. You notice something is not right. The world is changing faster. The structures that carried your own career may become irrelevant in the coming years. You can no longer say clearly what your child should be prepared for. A particular career? Perhaps no longer the lever it was for you. A political vision? Perhaps powerless against power structures that are not human. You simply do not know.

And this is not the usual parental worry. This is something of its own.

Throughout the centuries, parents have brought children into hard worlds. But they could always imagine that their children would fight. That freedom can follow oppression, that effort builds something, that a movement moves something. This was possible because the power structure to be fought was human. It had weaknesses. It was defeatable.

What you feel now is different.

The power structure into which your children are growing is, for the first time in history, not human. It thinks faster than any human organization. It adapts faster than a movement can form. Against it, fighting is no longer the right word. And this does something to you that parents before you did not have to go through. Your love for your children no longer finds a translation into the image of what they should be prepared for.

If you talk about this with other parents, you probably notice that no one talks about it. A silence by agreement, because the admission weighs too heavily.

I am writing to you because I believe this silence is wrong.

You are not alone with this question. I am a father myself, and I am going through the same question. It is the root of the book I have written and of the institute I have built. It is not a question I have solved. It is one I share.

What I have found for myself, not as a solution but as an honest answer:

What shrinks is not everything. What shrinks is influence in the large mass systems. A career as a lawyer, banker, manager may no longer be the lever. What remains is closer and older: relationships, local community, a bodily practice, artistic and inner expression, family as transmission across generations. What people can be for other people is not replaceable. Perhaps in the end it is the only thing that is not replaceable.

And perhaps, this is the most delicate point, it becomes more valuable, precisely because so much else is automated. Most people in history had no large political sphere of action. They carried families, raised children, baked bread, passed on knowledge, helped one another. If that is the form in which your children find meaning, then it is no less than what almost all people ever had. What changes is the expectation of a large sphere of action through career or politics. That expectation was new anyway, not an eternal human condition.

This is no reassurance. It is a shift in what you prepare your child for. More relationship-based, more bodily, more local, more enduring. A child who is loved in the family, who has a practice, sport, music, craft, who is embedded in a community and has learned a language of inner stillness, is not protected from the wave. But they have something the wave cannot destroy.

That is the answer, as far as I have it.

You are not alone. If you are looking for other parents who share this question, you will find them here at the institute. We do not solve the question. But we carry it together.

Richard Frederic Bertossa
Institute for ASI Resilience, 2026